From Dunkirque To Victory In Burma

People in story: Clarence Graham &
Cyril Allcock
Location of story: Leeds, The Fall Of France, Egypt And India
Unit name: 18th British General Hospital RAMC

This story was
submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk –
Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Clarence Graham.

On the 1 November 1939 my friend Cyril
Allcock and I received our call-up papers with instructions to report to
Heywood Barracks in Leeds. As a farm worker from West Breton near Wakefield I
had never been to Leeds, though it was only about 10 miles away. Cyril had been
there once and thought he knew where the barracks was, so off we went.

When we arrived we were all given a card
to hold with a number on, mine was number eight. Several hours later, all
number eight's were told to fall in and get onto trucks, we had no idea why or
where we were going. Our destination wasn't far away however, as we pulled up
at Beckets Park, Headingley, and our introduction to army life really started.

As we got off the truck, we were lined
up and marched up to the front of Carnegie College where a big fat man wearing
a Sam Brown belt and boots that shone like mirrors was standing at the top of
the steps. He gave us a welcoming speech along the lines of, "You are in
the Army now whether you like it or not. I am your Sergeant Major. Sergeant
Majors aren't born, we are appointed by God. Anything you get from now on is
through the goodwill of the government; you have no rights to anything. You are
here to do as you are told and I can do whatever I like to you, except get you
in the family way, and I can have damn good try at doing that!"

With that warm welcome ringing in our
ears, we were marched off to Cavendish House and allocated rooms, three men to
a room, with Straw palliases to sleep on. We were only given one blanket so we
had to use our great coats to keep warm. Matters weren't made any better when
the joiners came and removed all the bedroom doors the next day!

We also got our first taste of army
food, two sardines, two slices of bread and a knob of margarine on a tin plate.
Quite a contrast to the hearty meals I was used to eating on the farm.

We stayed at Beckets Park until late
February 1940 doing our basic training. We did our share of square bashing
under Staff Sergeant Hunter who later became our Sergeant major. Blisters from
the ill fitting army boots crippled most people. At the end of it I was posted
to the Royal Army Medical Corps, 18th General Hospital.

In late February 1940, with snow
covering the ground, we were marched with full kit to the tram stop and thence
by tram to Leeds railway station, where we boarded a train for Southampton.
This was the start of a journey that seemed never ending. At Southampton docks
we were given a tin of Bully Beef and some dog biscuits before boarding an ex
Isle of Man steamer called the Ben Me Cree. We spent the rest of the day
anchored in the Solent before sailing at midnight for France, arriving at Le
Havre the next morning.

France

We were then put on a French train with
coaches more like cattle trucks; the wooden seats were rock hard, and set out
for Rouen, a journey that took 39 hours! When we finally arrived in Rouen, we
halted in the station for a while, then set off back the way we had come for
about three miles, where we halted for 30 minutes or so, then went back to
Rouen. This shunting too and fro’ continued for several hours as we made the
journey 4 or 5 times. I seem to recall there was a dogfight going on above us
some of the time.

We finally arrived in Etaples, our
destination, the following afternoon and were marched off towards Boulogne and
a campsite almost opposite a First World War cemetery. The area of the campsite
had been used in the First World War and there were well-preserved dugouts
among the sand dunes. Many of these had old soldiers names on the walls and
there were munitions lying around including lots of 303 bullets. It seemed
quite strange to be back in the same places where the last generation had
fought the Germans before.

I remember the campsite well, we had one
cold water tap to serve all our needs, and the first person up in the mornings
had to light a fire under it to thaw it out, so we could get washed and shaved,
it was so cold! We slept in Nissen huts that had one inch gaps between the
floor boards, making them draughty and cold, so unless you were huddled round
the one coal fired stove in the hut, you were always cold.

I had my twenty- first birthday in
February, and my mother had made me a wonderful birthday cake. She was a
wonderful cook and could ice a cake like a professional. So she pooled all
their rations together to make me a cake, and sent it off in a parcel. Sadly it
never reached me as the ship carrying it over was sunk.

The tents for the hospital finally
arrived so we became operational. In March the weather got much warmer, so warm
in fact, we were able to swim in the sea at Le Touquet. Our first wounded
soldiers arrived around the same time, they were French, and we began to
realise that we really were at war.

Just how true that was came home to us
in April when German aircraft bombed Le Touquet airport. We all ran for the
slit trenches in the woods nearby and the German aircraft began to machine gun
us as we ran, at times the bullets seemed to be on my heels. Luckily we all
made it to the woods, where we found our Matron, a veteran of the First World
War, with the medals to prove it, calmly sitting in the slit trench knitting!

Retreat to Boulogne.

As May progressed, it became clear
things were going badly, and by the third week in May we learned that the
Germans had taken Arras, only 40 miles away. We were ordered to evacuate the
hospital and make our way to the coast as best we could. We set off to march as
we had no transport and were attacked by German aircraft at regular intervals.
At one point, I remember the planes coming and I managed to jump over a barbed
wire fence to get into some woods, landing in a bed of nettles. I lay in those
nettles for what seemed like hours and never got stung once. When the planes
disappeared I had great difficulty climbing back over the fence that I had
cleared so effortlessly when the planes attacked!

We finally found some transport but had
to abandon it after only a mile or so, as there were so many civilians on the
roads trying to escape from the Germans, it was impossible to move. There were
thousands of people all trying to carry their children and what possessions
they could, so they moved very slowly, and of course there was chaos every time
the German planes attacked.

In the end we made it to Boulogne
cross-country, and found the town ablaze, not just from the bombing but also
from the piles of equipment being destroyed. It was terrible to see mountains
of brand new equipment being burned and blown up. Finally, a ship came into the
docks to collect us. The Irish Guards came off the ship to form the rear guard
to allow us to escape; they left all their heavy equipment on board and were in
action within about an hour of leaving the ship.

It was chaos at the docks with French
civilians begging to be taken to safety on the ships, and troops were shooting
their own fingers and toes off to get a place as wounded. All the time there
were explosions from burning equipment.

We helped to load a lot of French
wounded, including several high-ranking officers, then sailed for England. As we
left, there were depth charges going off all around us but once we got out to
sea, it was flat calm.

When we reached Dover, three of the
badly wounded French Colonels sprang off their stretchers and ran off the ship!
We weren't too impressed by that. In Dover the WVS were waiting and we got our
first hot cup of tea in five days, we had practically lived on cigarettes
during the evacuation. We looked a sorry sight, our uniforms were torn and
dirty, and none of us had been washed or shaved for days. But we were home and
we were safe and grateful for that.

England summer of 1940.

From Dover we went by train to the RMAC
Headquarters at Tidworth to be re-kitted out, then on by train to Peterborough
where we spent the long hot summer of 1940. The Army was asked to supply
volunteers to help get in the harvest and most of the farm workers were
delighted to do it. So for most of the summer we helped to get the harvest in
and got £5 a week from the farmer for helping. It was the most money I had
earned up until then.

In the autumn we moved to Pinewood’s
Hospital at Crowthorne. One night we were having a drink at the Iron Duke pub
when a bomb landed nearby. It had probably been jettisoned by a German plane.
We all dived under the bar where we stayed for 30 minutes while a dogfight
raged overhead. When we walked home we found the principal of the local
Broadmoor Hospital had been impaled on some iron railings by the bomb blast.

In September we moved to Edinbrough
where we stayed for three weeks, then by train to Gurrock where we boarded a
ship called the Volendam, for Egypt. The voyage took eleven weeks! We stopped
off in Cape Town along the way where we had 4 days leave. I remember when we
left, the decks were piled high with cases of oranges. This was a real treat as
they were in very short supply in England.

Egypt late 1940.

In Egypt we joined a tented hospital on
the Suez Canal where we had a lot of East African soldiers as patients. After
the doctors round one morning, one of the patients asked me to write a letter
to his mother for him. I readily agreed, but was amazed when he told me his
second wife was causing trouble at home and he wanted to ask his mother to sell
her and buy a cow!

I bought some gold in Egypt for my
wife's wedding ring. We could tell how the war in the desert was going by the
price of gold. If the price went up the Germans were winning and if it fell we
were! So I hung on until we were winning and got a good price. Sadly, the gold
never reached home; it was sunk on the ship carrying my parcel home.

All was going well in Egypt when we were
told to pack up again and take the train to the docks, where we boarded the SS
Andes, for Singapore. Sadly Singapore fell before we got there, so we were
diverted to Ceylon. The Andes was a terrific ship and was fast enough to sail
un-escorted, as it was too fast for submarines to keep up. There were a lot of
tough Australians on the ship and they were terrific gamblers, playing dice for
huge stakes. It got so bad, the officers tried to stop their pay to prevent
them gambling, and there was nearly a mutiny. Many of them were placed under
arrest and as a punishment they had to wait on all the medical staff for the
rest of the voyage, so we were well looked after.

In Ceylon, we transferred to a French
ship seized from Vichy Prance and it was filthy, we had to scrub it from top to
bottom. Even worse, the food was terrible. There were weevils in the flour, so
we were eating them. We landed in Karachi and got shore leave, then set sail
again and ended up back in Ceylon! We stayed there a week, and then went back
to Karachi where we were anchored, and confined to the ship for 11 days! We
finally repeated this process of sailing between Ceylon and Karachi four times
before landing.

From Karachi, we went by train to
Bombay, where we stayed for a week before going up to Puna. Our mob was split
up there and I went on to Secundrabad for a year and then to Bangalore where we
set up a hospital.

Once again we had some African wounded
who had been fighting the Japanese, and as I was helping one of these soldiers
to get undressed and into bed, I noticed a string round his neck with some
wizened bits of something strung on it. I tried to get him to put it in his
locker, but he got very upset and wouldn't let me. When I asked him why, he
said it was his "Ju Ju" and when I asked him what the Ju Ju was, he
said they were Japanese ears!

When we got leave, we often had little
money to spend and sometimes we spent the leave in Barracks. On one occasion,
we got hold of some Nisams rum and got roaring drunk. That wouldn't have
mattered too much, but as soon as I had a drink of water or tea over the next
few days, it set me off again. I seemed to be drunk for days. It was nearly
three weeks before I fully recovered from it, and it put me off drinking for a
long time, in fact I have never been drunk since.

A year later we went to Madras, to a
3000 bed hospital, and I finished the war there. It was a very hot and humid
place, no sooner had you got dressed after a shower than you were wet through
again. I was finally de mobbed in May 1945.

For someone who had never travelled the
thirty miles to Leeds before being called up, I certainly made up for it in the
army. In February 2005, for my 86th birthday, I got a wonderful surprise from
my colleagues in the British Legion when a brown paper parcel containing my
‘missing’ 21st birthday cake was presented to me, together with a story of its
travels since it left home for France 65 years earlier!